We Only Have Each Other

Yes, it was one particular epic viral customer service fail, but we do know Comcast is literally and vocally insulted when we tell them we’re breaking up with them.Their old-school bundle of channels we don’t want plus a home phone we don’t care about is their ammunition against the millions who have cut and are considering “cutting the cord.”

Impossibly large corporations and entrenched, mature enterprises develop a mentality that looks at its (non-wealthy) customers with derision.There’s endless evidence to support this theory:

The taxicab industry is trying to get laws passed to neuter Lyft and Uber, because we are sick of getting a ride their way.

The music industry sued its customers for downloading music, because we were sick of paying 22 dollars for a CD.

The prison industry is lobbying against the proposed release of non-violent drug offenders, because they need humans in cages to make a profit.

The movie industry sued to ban the sale of VCRs because we wanted to watch movies when we wanted to.

The hotel industry and their friends in municipal government have waged war against airbnb.

The auto dealer industry – with their massive political donations – hates Tesla Motors, because we absolutely despise buying a car from a dealer.

There are hundreds of other local, national and global examples. Mature industries use the law to mute the competition that’s going to kill them.

Disrupters rock. They create thousands of economic mini revolutions. I’m a fan of revolution, so I love how much car dealers hate Tesla.

The only way we can fight against massive, too-big–to-fail corporations who rule our planet and want to limit our options is to give each other rides and share spare bedrooms. When we control our “inventory” and offer “services”, the incumbent industries cannot possibly compete.

This is the way we can disrupt employment. When we take stock of our skills and talents, offer them at a fair price to those who wish to learn from us, and reward the hardest working among us with greater wealth, we have moved away from the companies whose goals are to shrink markets, consolidate operations, and keep almost all of us from standing too close to the servers that suck our personal data and generate billions of dollars of profit for a relatively small group of people at little cost.

The corporations don’t care about you. The servers serve a handful of masters and mistresses. What the hell are you going to do for a job when there are less and less of them every year?

You’re going to profit from what you’re good at. And I’m going to help you, dammit.

Stay tuned.

John Scott is the Career Services Manager and an instructor at the School of Multimedia Communications, Academy of Art University, San Francisco. His latest book “You. Employed: why winners get jobs” is in the Amazon book store.